ce, temperance, and justice. Now a man may be a very
bad one, and yet possess three out of the four. Every cutthroat must,
if he has been a cutthroat on many occasions, have more fortitude and
more prudence than the greater part of those whom we consider as the
best men. And what cruel wretches, both executioners and judges, have
been strictly just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what
generosity, what genius, their sentence have removed from the earth!
Temperance and beneficence contain all other virtues. Take them home,
Plato; split them, expound them; do what thou wilt with them, if thou
but use them.

Before I gave thee this lesson, which is a better than thou ever gavest
any one, and easier to remember, thou wert accusing me of invidiousness
and malice against those whom thou callest the great, meaning to say
the powerful. Thy imagination, I am well aware, had taken its flight
toward Sicily, where thou seekest thy great {111} man, as earnestly and
undoubtingly as Ceres sought her Persephone. Faith! honest Plato, I
have no reason to envy thy worthy friend Dionysius. Look at my nose!
A lad seven or eight years old threw an apple at me yesterday, while I
was gazing at the clouds, and gave me nose enough for two moderate men.
Instead of such a godsend, what should I have thought of my fortune if,
after living all my lifetime among golden vases, rougher than my hand
with their emeralds and rubies, their engravings and embossments; among
Parian caryatides and porphyry sphinxes; among philosophers with rings
upon their fingers and linen next their skin; and among singing-boys
and dancing-girls, to whom alone thou speakest intelligibly,--I ask
thee again, what should I in reason have thought of my fortune, if,
after these facilities and superfluities, I had at last been pelted out
of my house, not by one young rogue, but by thousands of all ages, and
not with an apple (I wish I could say a rotten one), but with pebbles
and broken pots; and, to crown my deserts, had been compelled to become
the teacher of so promising a generation? Great men, forsooth! thou
knowest at last who they are.

_Plato_. There are great men of various kinds.

_Diogenes_. No, by my beard, are there not!

_Plato_. What! are there not great captains, great geometricians,
great dialecticians?

_Diogenes_. Who denied it? A great man was the postulate. Try thy
hand now at the powerful one.

_Plato_. On seeing the exercis